This is a journal of my vegetable gardens. Skippy was my first dog and he thought the garden was his, even though I did all the work. Now Suzie and Charley follow in his footsteps. We're located near Boston (USDA zone 6A). I have a community plot, a backyard vegetable garden, fruit trees, berry bushes, chickens, and bees. I use sustainable organic methods and do my best to grow all of my family's vegetables myself.

video - white house veggie garden

This is a great video! It shows a time-lapse of a man digging, planting and harvesting a new vegetable garden in his front yard (a small "white house"). An analogy is made to THE white house. He makes a lovely garden with great beds and rows of veggies. Tomatoes and radish are harvested. Watch it if you like to watch a garden grow. Its also a nice "how-to" if you want to start your own garden.

This is just what I often imagine when I see a nice sunny green lawn! Politics aside, vegetable gardening is just a very rewarding pastime.

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

election!

a rainy late October day in my vegetable gardens

Photos of both of my vegetable gardens - I love taking pictures in the rain. My fall greens are doing GREAT in this dreary cool weather.

I haven't had time to go to my community plot (top photo) in several days. But what a nice surprise to see how everything has grown underneath the salt hay mulch. There is some evidence of more frosts. The peas are pretty badly damaged, as well as the tips of some beet leaves. I picked a good harvest of salad greens and radish.

vegetable garden politics

I added a few excerpts here, because its a great topic, but you can go ahead and read all 8,000 words (!) yourself."After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy — 19 percent." "...chemical fertilizers, pesticides, farm machinery, modern food processing, packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food."

What to do?Resolarize the American FarmReregionalize the Food SystemRebuild America’s Food Culture

"...most symbolically resonant step in building a new American food culture. And that is this: tear out five prime south-facing acres of the White House lawn and plant in their place an organic fruit and vegetable garden.

"When Eleanor Roosevelt did something similar in 1943, she helped start a Victory Garden movement that ended up making a substantial contribution to feeding the nation in wartime. (Less well known is the fact that Roosevelt planted this garden over the objections of the U.S.D.A., which feared home gardening would hurt the American food industry.) By the end of the war, more than 20 million home gardens were supplying 40 percent of the produce consumed in America. The president should throw his support behind a new Victory Garden movement, this one seeking “victory” over three critical challenges we face today: high food prices, poor diets and a sedentary population. Eating from this, the shortest food chain of all, offers anyone with a patch of land a way to reduce their fossil-fuel consumption and help fight climate change. (We should offer grants to cities to build allotment gardens for people without access to land.) Just as important, Victory Gardens offer a way to enlist Americans, in body as well as mind, in the work of feeding themselves and changing the food system — something more ennobling, surely, than merely asking them to shop a little differently.

"I don’t need to tell you that ripping out even a section of the White House lawn will be controversial: Americans love their lawns, and the South Lawn is one of the most beautiful in the country. But imagine all the energy, water and petrochemicals it takes to make it that way. (Even for the purposes of this memo, the White House would not disclose its lawn-care regimen.) Yet as deeply as Americans feel about their lawns, the agrarian ideal runs deeper still, and making this particular plot of American land productive, especially if the First Family gets out there and pulls weeds now and again, will provide an image even more stirring than that of a pretty lawn: the image of stewardship of the land, of self-reliance and of making the most of local sunlight to feed one’s family and community. The fact that surplus produce from the South Lawn Victory Garden (and there will be literally tons of it) will be offered to regional food banks will make its own eloquent statement."

Just imagine! I bet it would be a beautiful garden!

KGI originated this proposal with their "Eat the View" campaign. They have some nice information on this topic here.

Sunday, October 26, 2008

my first CSA distribution

My first CSA share!

I picked up 50 lbs of fantastic vegetables from my local CSA (Gretta's Farm) this weekend. The farm is 1 mile from my house. Not only am I really excited to enjoy eating these, I'm also considering what I would like to grow in my own garden next fall. Gretta (and partner farms) grow all of this locally using sustainable organic methods.

Well, the apples were first. They're going fast. Very crisp and sweet.

Second was the oak leaf lettuce. Excellent! I will definitely add this to my crops next year.

And third was the carrots and red peppers. Nice in salads. Sweet colorful spears in martinis. I tried to grow red peppers this year without success and will try again next year.

Tonight I made a delicious cabbage risotto with the Napa cabbage (also using carrot, onion and parsley). I'll consider cabbage growing myself (Napa, savoy or other). It's an attractive and very hardy fall vegetable.

I'm looking forward to eating my giant sweet potato. I'll probably make sweet potato fries (deep fry) half for one meal and then bake the other half. Yummy! I don't know much about growing these. A gardener I know at the BVG grew a crop this year and was very happy with them. I'll have to look into this.

No, we're not eating all these veggies ourselves. We shared half with another family (David and Jennifer) and will bring some of our half to my parents. I still have greens, radish, beets, carrots, potatoes and onions from my garden. (If we don't look out, we'll turn into rabbits with all these veggies!)

Thursday, October 23, 2008

a week of harvests

This is my harvest this week. I picked the last of my green tomatoes, peppers and chiles today. And I picked a bunch of pretty little yellow signet marigolds and fleabane (weed) flowers. I have been regularly pulling escarole, red lettuce, arugula, beets and still-way-too-many-radishes. I had enough to give my parents a nice bag of storage potatoes, onions, a giant Brandywine tomato, radish and some greens. I also picked two more birdhouse gourds to total five this year.

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

winterizing the vegetable garden

I was looking at The 2009 Farmers' Almanac and see they are predicting a "numbingly cold and snowy" winter for the Northeast US. OMG! I hope they're wrong. I'm never ready for winter. I keep hoping we'll skip it somehow. Nevertheless, my garden is winterized now.

"How do you winterize you vegetable garden?" I see this question around a lot so here's what I did. (Do you do the same?)

To winterize, I removed all debris and summer plants. I pulled all the squashes and tomatoes and tomato poles and beans, etc. These went into the compost pile and I raked the ground. Since the soil in my community plot is very acidic (low pH - 5.5 last time I send out a sample) I added lime.

I planted a cover crop in the bare areas without fall crops (a mix from Johnny's Selected Seeds called green manure mix, includes field peas, vetch, clover and winter rye). I'll turn this under in the spring. Peas and vetch add nitrogen to the soil, others add organic matter and prevent runoff. I lightly raked in the cover seeds and lime.

Finally I added a good layer of grass clippings or salt marsh hay around my growing fall crops. This should keep the weeds down in this area, retain moisture, and help protect from the very cold weather that will (unfortunately) be here soon. I hope to pick greens into December. Last year my kale was good down to 10 degrees F.

Monday, October 20, 2008

plot aerial

Here's a photo of my community garden plot that I took yesterday. This is the old west side of my plot - the newly added half is to the right of this photo. Click on the photo to see my mouse overs.

So far, only the back left bed is mulched. I was lucky to find a couple bales of salt marsh hay today. ($9 a bale at my local True Value.) Hopefully I'll get the rest of the garden mulched and ready for cold tomorrow. I still have a lot of greens and roots and I'm hoping they last as long as possible.

Yes, the black fur ball in the center is Skippy sitting in the hole he dug.

Sunday, October 19, 2008

planting bulbs

Skippy's big hole

Usually Skippy is very calm and obedient. Today was different. He got that look in his eyes and he wanted to PLAY. To get my attention, first he dug a hole in the middle of my garden, then the bit a few holes in the cuff of my pants, then he stole the bag of tulip bulbs I was planting. OK! I get it. Time for a walk!

winterizing the garden

It was pretty chilly this morning. I guess winter will come again after all ....

Skippy and I did a few chores to continue to winterize the garden. "We" planted spring bulbs, turned over the bird bath, watered the dry fall greens, and "our" main job - mulch. I collected freshly cut grass from the fields and started mulching my beds.

Mulching with grass trimmings: I feel good tonight knowing my plants are tucked in with a nice covering of mulch. The fields nearby were recently mowed, so I collected cuttings and mulched my recently planted garlic bed. This bed also has carrots, broccoli and red lettuce. The grass trimmings probably have a lot of weed seeds. I'll see how bothersome this is in the spring. For now, its an easy and cheap solution for mulching. I've heard that our local hardware store has a new shipment of salt marsh hay. Tomorrow I'll buy a few bales of this, but at $10 a bale and knowing that mowing hay is not so good for the salt marsh, I'm wondering if grass trimmings aren't the better mulch.

Planting bulbs: I planted 5 small botanical tulip bulbs (Violacea black base) and 2 daffodils bulbs. I remember thinking how nice the spring flowers looked in other plots last year. Just a few go a long way.

The quotes above are because Skippy didn't help AT ALL today - HE wanted to PLAY. Skippy dug a BIG hole and ran all over the garden. I think the crisp fall air must feel GOOD to a puppy! That's OK, we went for a nice long walk in the fields together.

as pretty as a pea

I wish this was an early spring pea blossom. I read at the Tiny Farm Blog that pea plants are hardy, but the pods are not. Interesting. If cold temps hold off a week or two, maybe I could see this in action.

Saturday, October 18, 2008

Gretta's distribution

I went over to Gretta's CSA farm this morning and took some photos of her distribution. It has a number of new items that will need identification for her customers. I'll be posting a photo labeled with mouse-overs on her blog later today.

I spread all the vegetables on a bench in her hoop house, along with a box of each of the five apple varieties (each distribution includes just one bag of apples). Lots of roots, squashes and greens. Skippy seemed to like hanging out here. He seems to have taken to the task of guarding vegetables - just like he does at my garden.

I have signed up to get half a distribution myself. Mine starts next weekend. I'm looking forward to trying all of these veggies myself!

The fall greens are still looking good this week. And they are not all 'green', but are often red!

The top photos are a beautiful radicchio Gretta gave me. I like to eat this fresh, sliced and mixed with my escarole and lettuce. The heads in her fields are wonderful (photo here) and this is another vegetable I'll consider for my garden next year.

Some of my greens are still small and I'll mark down to start them a couple weeks earlier next year. But small greens are nice too. I can eat my small simpson lettuce and red summer crisp as 'microgreens' if the weather turns cold soon. And I can eat my peas as tendrils.

These greens have all done fine during the two light frosts that killed my basil, eggplants and marigolds. The only thing bothering the greens is the lack of water. Its been off at my community plot for two weeks already. Everything's looking dry. Tomorrow I hope to go over with a big water jug. I'll water my greens and pick a fresh salad for dinner.

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

fresh lima beans

Here's a vegetable I'm thinking of adding to my garden next year. Its always fun to try something new. I bought these fresh lima beans at a farm nearby, Wilson's Farm. They were delicious. Johnny's has a variety of large limas (link) that sound nice. A bush bean. 85 days.

evening field

Here's the field next to my community plot. I thought it looked beautiful in the setting sunlight tonight. The field was mowed yesterday and the gardens have that rich smell of freshly mowed hay.

October 15: I thought I'd add the images below.

The original (unadjusted) image is on the left. The one on the right has only shadows and exposure adjusted. Neither of these look like the scene as I remembered it, so I made more adjustments. Here's how I remember the scene:

But then my eyes aren't so good and maybe it wasn't quite so colorful, so the top photo is my compromise.

Note added Oct 28: Can you believe it - there's a Port-O-Potty in the middle of this lovely field today! Actually that's great. The Friends of Rock Meadow is having a two weekend volunteer clean-up event. I hope to be able to help out next Sat. (Don't really want to us the seat in the middle of the field though....)

Monday, October 13, 2008

this weekend's harvest

I picked the last of my shell beans and most of my green tomatoes this weekend. I cleaned up most of my home garden (except for my giant kale plants). Though the weather is balmy, nothing is really growing anymore. The sun is very low and days are shorter. I spread a good layer of winter rye seed that should get off to a good start if this warmth keeps up.

Tomorrow I am looking forward to a visit to my community plot. I haven't been there at all in the past THREE days! (A long absence for me.) My plot is still growing nice escarole, beets, carrots and radish.

pear tree photos

My newly transplanted trained pear trees are all set for winter. Skippy and I planted them with compost, mulched with fresh hay/grass trimmings, watered them well, added some new tree wrap to protect their trunks and secured their branches to the fence. I also added a bit of lattice to maybe give some extra wind protection. I'm considering giving them a different support system in the spring to allow the trees to stand up straight and not lean back against the fence.